Gambino-Morgenthau Accord: After a Day, the Re-examination Begins

A day after two Gambino brothers agreed to pay a $12 million fine and turn over a portion of their business to avoid a potential prison sentence, there is some disagreement over who blinked first -- the reputed heirs to the late Carlo Gambino or the Government.

But even if the plea bargain in State Supreme Court in Manhattan does not "drive the Gambinos from the garment industry," as District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau says, law-enforcement officials and experts on the Mafia say it does reflect a significant advance in tactics against organized crime's longstanding corruption of legitimate businesses.

The basic idea is that it is more important to drive mobsters from their businesses than to put them in jail.

The agreement itself was the subject of some dispute -- and spin control -- yesterday. Prosecutors say Thomas and Joseph Gambino will have to sell half their 300 to 400 trucks in the garment industry. But defense attorneys said the Gambinos would have to part with only a third of their 152 trucks.

Mr. Morgenthau said at a news conference on Wednesday that all 400 trucks would have to go. But both prosecutors and defense lawyers said yesterday that the agreement clearly allows the Gambinos to continue making a much larger number of deliveries from manufacturers to retail stores.

The agreement clearly states that it applies only to that segment of the garment industry that the prosecution charged had been corrupted by the Gambino and Lucchese crime families -- deliveries between manufacturers and smaller sewing factories, many of them in Chinatown, where garments are stitched together.

"What it is is a beginning," said Michael Cherkasky, the chief of Mr. Morgenthau's investigation division and the principal architect of the Gambino prosecution. "It is not a panacea," he said. "It does not drive the mob out of the garment industry, and it does not drive the Gambinos out of business."

Mr. Cherkasky said the agreement allowed the Gambinos to continue operating in areas of the garment industry that "we believe have not been corrupted."

"The agreement does not end the threat or control of organized crime," he said. "But it does get the Gambinos out of the most lucrative part of their business, the part where they reaped the biggest profits and that part which they corrupted."

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The conflicting claims of victory and opposing versions of who actually sought to make a deal first were mixed yesterday with a large dose of skepticism from garment makers who have witnessed organized crime's penetration of their industry over generations and who say they have seen very little that has stopped it.

More than a dozen fashion executives declined to comment and many of those who did were not certain what the agreement meant.

Several said the garment industry could be worse off without the Gambinos. "With the mob involved," said one executive who requested anonymity, "you never had any theft and the prices seemed fair."

But Mr. Cherkasky says the court-appointed special master is an important step in breaking organized crime's hold on businesses and labor unions. This person will have the authority to insure that the Gambinos and other trucking companies reputedly controlled by the Lucchese crime family do not carve up a segment of the garment industry again. If the agreement is broken, the defendants can be imprisoned. He said Federal court decrees overseen by court-appointed monitors have had considerable success in insuring that unions like the longshoremen and the teamsters abide by agreements to throw out mob influence or risk going to prison.

Conversely, Mr. Cherkasky said that when such monitors were not given adequate authority and resources there was less success. He cited, as an example, the administrator of the Fulton Fish Market who was appointed by a Federal judge in 1988 to help drive the Mafia out of the market.

"Some of the mob leaders were imprisoned," Mr. Cherkasky said, "But the mob still controls the fish market."

Some law-enforcement experts agreed with his assessment.

The director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, Ronald Goldstock, said, "Simply putting people into prison doesn't deter organized crime." He added, "You can only succeed by challenging organized crime's structural hold."

Thomas A. Repetto, head of the Citizen's Crime Commission of New York City, said the agreement "was the right way to go."

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A version of this an analysis; news analysis appears in print on February 28, 1992, on Page B00003 of the National edition with the headline: Gambino-Morgenthau Accord: After a Day, the Re-examination Begins. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe